


My Heart is Breathing

by Barkour



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 20:03:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5678836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian takes a blow for the Bull, and the Bull confronts him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Heart is Breathing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dichotomous_Dragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dichotomous_Dragon/gifts).



> For the Adoribull Holiday Exchange! Prompts used: hurt/comfort, and someone taking a blow for the other. This is set after their individual character quests, but before the end of the game.

The Bull shouldered his way into the tent. The rain pattered noisily against the canvas. 

Dorian, back bent and given up to the healer, looked over his arm. He'd filth caked in his mustache, the hairs plastered. 

"I hope you brought wine," said Dorian. The Bull spread his hands. Dorian made a show of sighing.

"Close it," said the healer. "And you. Stop moving." The needle flashed. She tugged the thread. The stitch settled beneath Dorian's shoulder.

The Bull stooped beneath the first support. The canvas flap dropped into place again. He lingered there in the entrance, on the mud cloth.

"What thanks," Dorian said. "I risk my life, and you come empty-handed to watch this barbarian sew me up like a soldier playing at housewife."

"All right," said the healer. She sat back with the needle still in hand. "How about you finish up?"

"Fetch me a mirror and I'll do it."

"You know," said the Bull, "I heard the Avaar pour piss on their wounds. Keeps 'em from going bad."

Dorian made a tremendous face. The healer laughed and leaned in again. 

"Perhaps I spoke in haste."

"Did that, did you," said the healer.

"I should hate to use barbarian so freely no word remains for _that_."

The healer worked another minute till she'd finished laying the stitches. The gash that had split Dorian's back along the left side looked a slender thing, so closed. It did not seem at all threatening. She gave Dorian her advice, wiped his back clean of the last fresh stains, bound a poultice with white cloth over the wound, and went to see to the next bloodied soul.

"You're remarkably quiet," said Dorian, quite lightly. He fussed with the remains of his shirt, stripped of him by the healers. "Do you mean to just stand there looking at me all night? I could hardly blame you. Even in extremis I cut a mean figure." He folded the cloth over and tossed it to the foot of the cot. 

The Bull flexed his hands. His gaze went to the cloth, unneatly bundled. Blood marked the linen. He breathed in through his nose and let it out his mouth.

"Well," said Dorian. 

He passed a hand over his mussed mustache. The light from the glowstones, hung at even intervals from the central beam above, made bruises beneath his eyes. The rain fell like small stones.

The healer's tent was a large space, and empty but for a woman soldier asleep on another cot, and the man the healer now tended. The skirmish in the mire with the Red Templars had come easily won and with little blood.

"Not that it isn't a pleasure to be glowered at from afar," Dorian went on. "But the healer's orders are orders. I must get my beauty sleep."

The Bull left clods of mud and earth in his wake. The ends of his horns brushed against the canvas; then the ceiling sloped higher and he walked without slowing. He stood before Dorian. Dorian lifted his head.

"What the hell were you doing?"

He cupped Dorian's face in his hands. Dorian's eyes, so pale beneath the sunlight, were made dark by the Bull's shadow, by the weird light of the glowstones.

"I should have thought it obvious." 

Dorian's hand rose. He hesitated. Then his jaw set, and he gripped the Bull's wrist. His fingers were long and rough and chilled, like a man who had bled into the rain.

"Sure," the Bull agreed, "obvious. Taking an axe blow to the back, who wouldn't think of that?"

"An axe meant for your throat, if you'd cared to pay attention."

"Didn't ask you to tag in for me." 

The Bull stroked Dorian's cheekbone with a thumb. Dorian's fingers tightened about his wrist.

"And I didn't ask you to march in here and interrogate me for watching your back in a fight," Dorian snapped. "Is this what soldiers do? Let their fellows die stupidly?"

"That why you didn't listen to me?" the Bull demanded. "I told you to stay back--"

Dorian barked a 'ha!' "As if I needed coddling."

"I could've taken the hit."

"Well, clearly so could I," said Dorian. He was mulish now, glaring at the Bull beneath his mud-streaked brow. "A thank you is customary when someone saves your life, but I suppose that's too much to expect. I don't know why you're so angry--"

"Really," said the Bull through his teeth. "Can't put it together, can you."

"And let go of my face!" 

The Bull lowered his hands. Dorian's fingertips had settled over his pulse. He held on to the Bull's wrist. The Bull thought of mentioning it.

A glowstone swung. The light moved in strange circuits across Dorian's dark face. The Bull had struck the edge of the stone with his horn in leaning back.

Finally the Bull spoke again. "You put yourself at risk."

"Am I one of your 'guys' now?" asked Dorian sneeringly. "Will this go on my performance review? Should I start calling you 'chief,' or only--" The rest of it came out, in a breathy jumble. "--in bed?"

"Stop," said the Bull.

Dorian's eyes dropped. He'd blood dried along the right temple. It mingled cozy with the grime. 

"I need to rest," said Dorian. 

The Bull turned his wrist till it clicked. Dorian let go his arm. He rubbed the hand against his clothed thigh.

"Don't get yourself killed," said the Bull, "looking after me."

A muscle in Dorian's jaw tightened, and he said, "It isn't as if I did it out of love for you," without kindness.

The Bull breathed. The tang of blood had stuck in his nose. He could not shake it. It lingered like so after every battle, as sweet and as bitter as the humming beneath his skin. Out of sacrifice, strength.

Dorian reached for his mustache. He scratched at the worst of the caking. Gritted crumbs tumbled. 

"I wish you would stop standing there," he said snappishly, but the line of his shoulders was made a slope, even with the tension of pain. "Lecture given, I grasp your point, next time I'll let them take your head as that's clearly what you most want. Now go away. Grant me a little dignity."

The Bull did stand there, even as Dorian turned from him and made as if to lie down, fussing a time with the one thin pillow allotted the cot. He beat his fist against it. The Bull looked at Dorian's stitched back, that puckered, black-laced line that ran from next to his spine nearly to his ribs. 

The Bull ran his tongue along the roof of his mouth. His teeth hurt. The rain ached in his knee. 

"Thought you were dead." He said it roughly. Very low. 

He'd heard Dorian's shout. A cry of "idiot." The Bull began to turn. Rain, in his eye. A weight, striking his side. The blow had glanced off Dorian, knocking him into the Bull, but the Bull had smelt the blood and heard the grunt in Dorian's throat and felt his hands touching the Bull's breast then sliding away; and he had thought it.

Dorian did not lift his face. The muscles low in his back trembled. He smoothed a palm across the battered pillow. 

"Well, as you can see," said Dorian, "I am still here. Somewhat worse for the wear, but my face untouched."

The Bull brushed the ruined shirt off the foot of the bed, to sit there beside Dorian. Dorian again looked over his arm at the Bull. This time when he did it the Bull set his hand low on Dorian's back. The little spasms moved beneath his fingers. 

The Bull leaned forward. Dorian's eyes closed. The dirt from his mustache marked his lips. 

The kiss ended. The Bull said to Dorian's lips, "What I want, is for you to keep breathing."

Dorian's lashes were black on his skin. His jaw worked. Soft sound, a squeak: he ground his teeth. The Bull brushed his hand across the small of Dorian's back and kissed him gently again. The gentleness stung the Bull. All of it stung. 

"Then--" But Dorian's honed tongue failed. He swallowed. His lashes rose. He looked at the Bull. He tried it anyway: "Then stop putting yourself at risk."

"I can't do that," said the Bull.

"You can't expect me to twiddle my thumbs," said Dorian, "when anyone is in danger. To sit--high and dry over the scrum--"

"You're right," the Bull said. He lifted his hand to touch Dorian's jaw, to hold it between finger and thumb. "I don't. But..." 

Dorian looked at him. His breath was warm on the Bull's cheek. The glowstone's light left coppered markings along the side of his face, off the sweat that remained on his skin.

The Bull, uncomfortable, unable to say it as it might be said, shrugged. The corner of Dorian's mouth flicked. 

"I might understand," Dorian said. 

He laid his hand on the Bull's knee. 

"It'll take much more than some fanatic with a rock on a stick to lay me flat," Dorian told him. "It would hardly befit my pedigree."

The Bull laid his own free hand on top of Dorian's. Dorian turned another measure to him. How to say it? To explain it? The Bull had known for a very long time how his death would go. It would be as it was meant to be. Perhaps he was no longer of the Qun; what he was had not changed. He understood that now. In the end he would die in the thick of battle, and that would be good. That death could not be for Dorian. He found he did not like to think of Dorian dying at all. The Bull stroked Dorian's jaw. His wrist, too.

"Yeah," he said. "You'd better not. I'm not watching you shit your guts out in a field."

"I don't want to clean your death shits either," said Dorian, and he turned his hand over so that he might hold the Bull's in his own.

The Bull lowered his head, to press his brow to Dorian's brow. His horns cast long silhouettes upon the canvas drop cloth. They rose from Dorian's own shadow. 

"You're not fucking dying on my watch," the Bull said to him. "You got that?"

Dorian's eyes were pale like the rain. The hurting of his wound lined his brow; the soft folds at the corners of his eyes deepened. Dorian lifted his other hand. He brushed his fingers down the Bull's cheek, the blind, scarred side of his face.

"All right," said Dorian. He stroked the Bull's cheek again. Again. "All right."

The Bull closed his eye. The calluses on Dorian's fingers rasped upon the Bull's skin. He smelled the rain, and the sweat dried to Dorian's skin, and the mud beneath the drop cloth, and the astringencies of the poultice Dorian wore on his back.

Dorian ducked. He pressed his face to the Bull's neck. The Bull tipped his head, to rest his cheek on Dorian's muddied crown.

"But I won't let you die," said Dorian. "Not for me."

It would be a good death, thought the Bull. He would not mind it. And he found, then, that his anger was gone, the fear too. That was when he knew it, the word that would say what was to say. He was not frightened of it then. 

"So," said the Bull, "we just gotta keep not dying out there."

Dorian sniffed. He was remaking his armors. 

"It seems simple enough for me."

The Bull said, "Can do," and he slid his hand high upon Dorian's arm to hold him, and he thought, kadan, and he meant, my heart; and in his arms Dorian was beating.


End file.
